World Racers don’t handle money.
Each team has a money person, or “treasurer”, and a daily budget for each country, for each day, for each category: food, supplies, housing, and transport. Any adventuring or meals surpassing the modest daily amount must come from some secret personal reservoir.
Balance.
As I prepare for the transition of returning to responsibilities and freedoms, I am listening to some podcasts about financially honoring the Lord. There’s a really good series, Ducks in a Row, by Transformation Church and Robert Morris. It’s a good listen – or watch if that’s your thing. Robert Morris is a biblical teacher. I first heard him preach in Morocco, of all places, on the “joys” of money. I love listening to him. He brings so much Bible into the teaching, and no frills or campaigns or second offerings. Just straight facts.
My previous experience with these “give more to get more” speeches has been strictly motivational, usually emotional. They never once mentioned Levites! Or that there are a specific set of people to handle the money given to God. So le’me tell y’all about Levites. Levites are the people in the Bible who are assigned to build, keep, and maintain the temple of the Lord. They are also given a standard of purity to keep that is higher than even the laws given to Moses.
But Levites are important. Because of my ignorance, fundraising is the single-most difficult thing I have ever attempted.
Okay, maybe not. I have been through some tough seasons. But this has been DIFFICULT.
I am one of those hardworking people who takes pride in her sweat, a morbid sense of joy in the mundane routine of “work”, and a vile form of validation in a job well done. So, when someone told me that, to raise 19,000 dollars I was going to ASK PEOPLE… Well, I felt the opposite of pride, joy and validation. It was humiliating. Honestly, it still kinda is.
But I didn’t come on this trip to be validated. Or proud. Or morbidly filled with a false joy.
Like a Levite, I came to serve the Lord with all I am. Not just with all I have.
I will not be going back out on the field when I return home… I have huge dreams stirring in my soul for Pensacola and my hometown and my country. (More on that in another blog, another day.) I will, however, be looking for some Levites to support.
One of the points that I love in the aforementioned Transformation series (here’s an actual link) is you do have to give more to get more. You must pour out to become a river trustworthy of pouring into. Otherwise, you are a reservoir – full of life in an immediate sense, but not flowing life to distant lands, or even to your neighbor’s land, to be quite blunt.
I want to be a river.
